I purged gnome-panel{,-data} and gnome-applets{,-data} and reinstalled
and now it works.
None of the conffiles were out of date (no *.dpkg-dist files on the
machine) so I'm not sure why this would make a difference.
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish at debian.org> <hamish at cloud.net.au>